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DreamScape Art and books by René Donovan

On a quiet road in a small house that bears the name “The Enchanted Cottage,” artist René Donovan begins her day meditating and writing in her journal, a practice she has maintained
for more than thirty years. Outside the morning sun spreads across the garden warming her view. A blue and white hammock, a praying Buddha and ornamental grasses paint a scene of summer tranquility on Cape Cod.

René Donovan is a Cape Cod artist whose artistic vision encompasses a wide variety of subject matter – the seasons, the land, the shore, birds, butterflies, flowers, wildlife – all reflecting her own unique treatment
of color and light. René is not a typical Cape Cod artist. Her paintings depict worlds both profound and whimsical yet they incorporate sights familiar on this curving arm of land.

Her
paintings offer a new way of seeing the familiar sights of the Cape either through the contemplative stillness of her art or the whimsical charm of her vision as it appears in her popular “Rubber Duckie” paintings. This series depicts the ducks
in very realistic, smile-inducing natural scenes rich in play, wonder and happiness. She is a self-taught realist and master of light who has developed her own technique of applying layers of acrylic colors and glazing to create the effect of light filling
the canvas and glowing from within. Donovan has never studied art formally. She began painting as a child in her native Scituate, Rhode Island, named after Scituate, Massachusetts by early settlers. Her art has found its way into private collections from the
Cape and beyond. Word of mouth is her messenger.

The Stone Children opens at the end of World War ll in Germany. Uriel, a young soldier among those liberating Buchenwald Concentration Camp, sees not only the horrors but also sees images of butterflies, the symbol of transformation, drawn on the floors and walls of the barracks by children who had been imprisoned there. He learns that these images
are in every camp and is deeply affected.

When the war in the Pacific ends Uriel returns to his Cape Cod village,
marries his childhood sweetheart Marra and begins his career as a children’s book illustrator. Their home is filled with love but Uriel’s nights are tortured by nightmares of the horrors he witnessed at Buchenwald. Marra, a sculptor, also begins
to dream. She dreams of eggs. She dreams of children. Her dreams swam with the images of smooth-shelled eggs: brown, white, blue, speckled. From deep within the eggs came songs as if their interiors held choirs. She felt the sound in her belly like
something growing inside her, something that wanted to be born into the world.

A force had entered Uriel at Buchenwald, a something that wants to be known. It wants to communicate through him and Marra, guiding their art and bearing a healing message for all humanity. It wants to prepare the world for the children
to come, the Lumins, the compassionate children who had died in the Holocaust. This story takes the reader from World War ll through all the years that followed up to the infamous morning of September 11, 2001. Intertwined amid the turmoil and confusion of
those years are wonders and changes that raise humanity’s awareness. “There is a noble fragment within us, a kind of beginning, a small secret...coiled love in fluid stone.”

“The Daughters of Time”

On a summer afternoon in 1998, Lizzie Chetwyrd embarks on a journey that will change her life, and
the world, forever.

Lizzie’s story begins innocently enough when her elderly Aunt Maggie gives her the family’s ancestral home in Concord, Massachusetts. The house is full of memories for Lizzie, who spent childhood
summers there, losing herself in the sense of wonder and magic that seemed to dwell in the fabric of the house and its surroundings. But when she drives from her nearby Cambridge
apartment to visit the house for the first time in years, she is startled by its appearance. Time, the elements and neglect have diminished its former glory. The once imposing 18th century dwelling stands abandoned in an eerie tangle of vines, peeling paint
and sadness that seems to have erased the enchantment and consumed the spirit of the old house. On one of Lizzie’s
visits to Aunt Maggie in the nursing home where she is living, the old woman encourages her to spend more time at the house, listening and watching because “Concord has places of deep power and the house rests upon one.” Lizzie, who is accustomed
to hearing her aunt spin strange tales, dismisses the notion until Aunt Maggie shows her family daguerreotypes of the era. Lizzie is stunned to see her own image in one of the pictures. Lizzie’s
journeys begin through a fold in time—to 1842 where she meets her great-great-great-great Grandmother Sophronia. She befriends the visionaries Emerson
and Thoreau who soon suspect that she is more than a visiting relative. As the friendship deepens between Lizzie and the writers, they learn of her otherworldly journeys. Emerson’s writing begin to reflect Lizzie’s experience and his growing belief
that “Time and space are just inverse measures of the force of the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit sports with time.”

“Me 'n God in the Coffee Shop”

Me ‘n God in the Coffee Shop is a spiritual journey, a lullaby, an awakening. Its pages hold starlight and the fragrance of
new mown grass. With a blending of magic, mystery and ancient beliefs the reader is carried to a place of warm and tender joy, a place that whispers, “You are a miracle!”